NEW YORK - It would be comforting to believe that
Private Lynndie England's appearance in a military court
last week was the first step toward justice in the
Abu Ghraib prisoner-torture scandal. Photos of the
diminutive England grinning in front of naked, prostrate
Iraqis, one of whom she held by a dog leash, made her a
focus for the worldwide outrage that followed the
release in April of graphic images depicting torture,
sexual humiliation and perhaps murder by US soldiers in
Iraq.

But England's lawyer, who has asked
to call senior Bush administration officials as
witnesses, is not alone in believing culpability goes a lot
higher up the food chain than his client and the other
five Military Police personnel (MPs) still facing charges.
A trove of documents has come to light over the past
few months suggesting as much, and the body of evidence
is now such that veteran investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh, who broke much of the story in May,
recently accused senior administration officials, including
President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney,
of "war crimes".

Those voices demanding full
accountability are sailing into the prevailing winds,
however. With the November presidential elections
nearing and congressional hearings suspended for the
summer recess, and, perhaps most important, the well
of new images running dry, the sense of urgency that
first greeted the revelations has dissipated.

The evidence mountsIt's easy to
forget the jolt to the US body politic the scandal
generated just three months ago. As the images spilled
forth, cataloguing the dark underbelly of the war in
Iraq and the "war on terror", all of the
administration's grandiloquent rhetoric of freedom and
democracy suddenly came under fire. And when Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was hauled before the Senate
Armed Services Committee on May 7, glassy-eyed and for
once unable to conjure his trademark obfuscations, a
reckoning seemed imminent. In a rush of blood, one
commentator called it "the biggest tsunami since the
Iran Contra affair, maybe since Watergate".

But the administration has outrun the storm
clouds by withholding or delaying the release of
key documents, such as Red Cross reports and classified
annexes of Major-General Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib
that allege "systemic" abuse, and by clinging to its "few
bad apples" theory, even as evidence to the
contrary proliferates. And it's had the report of
the army inspector general, Lieutenant-General Paul Mikolashek, released on July 22
(the day before Congress recessed), to support its case.
Despite revealing a much higher number of abuses than
previously known - 94, with 20 deaths in custody - the
report blames "unauthorized actions taken by a few
individuals".

A wealth of declassified
government memos and witness testimony contradicts
Mikolashek, however. Taken together they indicate that,
if the administration did not directly order torture, it
certainly sought to obscure its definition and encourage
US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere to
believe that gathering intelligence was more important
that the manner of its extraction.

Stephen Watt,
an international human-rights fellow at the Center for
Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York, told Asia Times
Online the administration contemplated the use of
torture from the very beginning of its "war on terror".
"Quite clearly the use of torturous and inhumane
treatments was on the table. And in fact Donald Rumsfeld
sanctioned at one point the use of techniques that would
be tantamount to torture," he said. "So they clearly
sent a signal down to the lower ranks, the people that
actually perpetrated these heinous acts, that ... it was
open day."

CCR is currently involved in
the cases of three young British Muslims who claim to
have been tortured in US custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The violent beatings and sexual humiliation they say
they endured are consistent with the abuses at Abu Ghraib,
supporting the contention of Hersh and others that the
pattern of abuse "migrated" from the "war on terror" to
Iraq.

Hersh has made very specific claims in
that regard, writing that a highly classified Department
of Defense (DoD) "special-access program" (SAP) was set
up after September 11, 2001, to expedite the assassination or
arrest and interrogation of terrorism suspects. US
operatives were given free rein to use torture and
sexual humiliation (which was assumed to be a
culturally specific technique). Rumsfeld's decision
to extend the SAP into Iraq to break the insurgency
in early autumn 2003 led directly to Abu Ghraib, Hersh
contends.

Irrespective of the SAP, the public
record makes clear that early in the "war on terror" the
Bush administration sought to give itself considerable
latitude in the treatment of detainees. A first step in
this process was Bush's decision not to afford captives
from Afghanistan the protection of the Geneva
Conventions. In a February 2002 memo, Bush did call for
their "humane" treatment, but only "consistent with
military necessity" - an enormous loophole. He also said
he accepted Attorney General John Ashcroft's advice that
he had the authority to suspend the conventions "in this
or future conflicts".

The Department of Justice
advised the president in an August 2002 memo that he was
not bound by international conventions or US laws
prohibiting torture. And the memo said "the ban on
torture is limited only to the most extreme forms of
physical or mental harm", which produce, for example,
"death or organ failure". This may have been the
definition Bush had in mind when, on July 23, he
categorically denied having ever ordered "torture".

However intentionally opaque the president's
role, it now seems clear that his secretary of defense
authorized torture. An order Rumsfeld signed in December
2002 authorizes US interrogators to use "stress
positions", to strip and hood detainees, to intimidate
them with dogs, and to force them to stand for long
periods - "I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is
standing only limited to four hours?" he noted on a memo
written by a subordinate. Rumsfeld rescinded his order
in mid-January 2003, but new guidelines more
consistent with the Geneva Conventions were not issued
until April.

Rumsfeld's deputies were deeply
involved in executing the interrogation policy - most
importantly Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
Stephen Cambone and his military assistant,
Lieutenant-General William G (Jerry) Boykin - who is
best known for disparaging comments he has made about
Islam. Also central was Under Secretary of Defense
Douglas Feith, who had responsibility for setting policy
on prisoners in Iraq.

Much of the
abuse in the "war on terror" and Iraq seems to have
flowed in Major-General Geoffrey Miller's wake. Miller was in
charge of Guantanamo when the worst offenses are
alleged there, and traveled to Iraq last August to brief
interrogators on the methods being employed in Cuba. The
worst violations in Iraq happened in the months
following that trip. Command of all military prisons in
Iraq was handed to Miller in April, just as the scandal
erupted.

One of the key questions in the Abu Ghraib
scandal is whether senior officials instructed MPs
at the prison to "soften up" detainees for interrogation,
as the MPs claim. Classified annexes to the
Taguba report, revealed on July 28 by Rolling Stone magazine,
show that Miller recommended that MPs be "actively engaged
in setting the conditions for successful exploitation
of the internees". Colonel Thomas Pappas, commander
of a military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib,
told Taguba that Miller advised him that using dogs
was an effective method of doing so. The abuses were a
"specific result" of Miller's recommendations, said
Pappas.

The precise interrogation guidelines for
the Iraq theater were approved by General Ricardo
Sanchez, the senior US commander in Iraq until he was
reassigned in June. With Miller's counsel, Sanchez
issued interrogation rules of engagement (IROE) in autumn
2003. Those rules permitted sleep deprivation for 72
hours, the use of "stress positions" for 45 minutes,
subjecting detainees to temperature extremes, imposing
diets of bread and water, and the use of dogs. The
Washington Post has also reported allegations by a US
soldier charged in the scandal that Sanchez sat in on
interrogations that involved torture.

Little is
known of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency or
its former director, George Tenet, in the abuses in Abu
Ghraib. But together with a number of private
contractors, they have handled much of the interrogating
in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Command
responsibility Watt of CCR said that under the principal
of "command responsibility", well established
in US and international law, senior officials are
culpable for abuses, whether or not they ordered them
directly. "That responsibility adheres to the individual
at the top, regardless of whether he knew the specifics
of what were going on," he said. "So, under that
principle, Bush and senior officials within the
Department of Defense and the Department of Justice
could very well be found liable for the acts of the
individual officers themselves."

Even the
seemingly less egregious methods that were permitted,
such as sleep deprivation and the use of "stress
positions", are deemed torture in international law. So
it's unsurprising that senior officials denied
sanctioning them in their congressional testimony - and
may thus have committed perjury. Rumsfeld, for example,
denied any of the abuses were condoned by the DoD or
local unit regulations, and Sanchez said he never
authorized the harsher methods in the IROE.

The only senior official to have been disciplined
is Brigadier-General Janice Karpinski, the overall
commander of Abu Ghraib when the offenses occurred, who
was suspended in May. Karpinski has denied any knowledge
of the abuses - though one Iraqi has claimed to have
seen her in the room while he was being tortured,
"watching and laughing". Karpinski claimed on August 3
that the White House and Pentagon knew what was
happening and intentionally kept her out of the loop.

Among those who have yet to be charged are
Pappas, Colonel Steven Jordan - the director of
intelligence at the prison - and two private
contractors, Stephen Stephanowicz and John Israel of
CACI International, who were named by Taguba as the
individuals most likely to be "directly or indirectly"
culpable. They may yet see their day in court, but the
prospect of those who actually crafted and supervised
the interrogation policy facing justice looks less
probable. The simple fact that Miller retains his post
suggests the administration isn't holding its breath.

Torture and impunity Few expect the
six official DoD investigations still under way to
differ drastically from the Mikolashek report in their
conclusions. The committee that will collate their
findings is, after all, composed of members of the
Defense Policy Board, the semi-official DoD advisory
panel once headed by neo-conservative kingpin, Richard
Perle.

Watt said, therefore, that a genuinely
independent investigation needs to be set up. "You can't
have foxes investigating slaughters in henhouses, and
that's precisely what's happened here," he said. "The
outcome of an independent investigation, I think you
will find, would be that persons at the very top are
responsible for the acts that we saw at Abu Ghraib,
certainly for setting the conditions under which they
occurred. And they should be prosecuted in federal
court."

It's still conceivable that when Congress
returns next month, the Senate Armed Services Committee
will take up that mantle. But there were already
signs before the recess that its will was ebbing.
By June votes on how to proceed were going down party
lines. And the committee chairman, Republican Senator
John Warner, said on July 15 he won't hold substantial
hearings until all the current investigations are
complete. That could delay proceedings until after the
November election. So, for the present, it appears
impunity is the order of the day.

Ashraf
Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern
affairs based in New York and London.